A lot of people see Donald Trump as the physical embodiment of narcissistic xenophobia and Hitler-esque hate tantrums. He is exactly that, to be clear. He's an orange, ignorant, pig-faced, clown of a human being, whose business model consists entirely of writing his name on things. Bravo, sir.

But I really don't think Donald Trump is the problem. Donald Trump is a representative, possibly the elected representative, of a large group of misinformed, Bible-thumping, gun-toting racists that make up a good percentage of the United States. And that's sad. I'm not even sure Trump believes the things he says, or even realizes how many people like him and why. He's almost like an unwitting pawn in the grand game of thrones. We're a nation of self-made, superstitious, white, Christian, hyper-nationalists who hate poor, black people. Of course Donald Trump rose to power. It had to happen eventually.

But that's not completely fair. Not all Trump supporters are misinformed, or Bible-thumping, or gun-toting, or racists. Some of them are only one of those things. And that's the other sad thing: The Republican Party is a mess. They say cool things like, "Let's lower taxes," and follow it up with, "and imprison people who perform abortions." Or "Let's lower the national debt," and "make Christianity the official religion of the United States." I can get behind fiscal conservatism. But that bullshit social conservatism needs to die a long overdue death. We've progressed as a society. Move on.

Gingrich: Current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics which theoretically may be right, but it's not where human beings are. CNN: But what you're saying is ... liberals use these numbers, they use this sort of magic math. These are the FBI statistics. They're not a liberal organization, they're a crime-fighting organization. Gingrich: But what I said is equally true. People feel more threatened. CNN: They feel it, yes. But the facts don't support it. Gingrich: As a political candidate, I'll go with how people feel, and I'll let you go with the theoreticians.

That right there is a problem. And again, it's a representative problem. Gingrich, and Trump, and every other dim-witted, sexist, meat-peddler is -- or at least pretends to be -- immune to facts. Statements of fact, scientific polls, verifiable measurements -- they're all worthless to a certain large subset of the American populace. But feelings fly. They sell. They get you votes. That's one of the [many] reasons people don't like Hillary: She's too unfeeling. I just wish people could recognize when a mouth-breathing, petulant, pussy-grabber was selling them feelings, and when a cold-hearted, robotic, career politician was selling them policies. It's a dangerously unbalanced false equivalency. #politics

Libertarianism is something I know relatively little about, but I find its tenets somewhat attractive yet completely unrealistic. The general idea is a smaller government, with more personal freedoms. Sounds good so far. A common talking point is which functions of the federal government a libertarian candidate would remove. Department of Education, Department of Commerce, that type of thing. But when you start considering the effects of these policies, things get a little ridiculous. For one thing, the government employs a lot of people. So if you removed parts of the government, you'd have a fairly major increase in unemployment. People generally frown upon that type of policy. Second, the government does a handful of things that literally no one else wants to or is able to do, such as garbage collection, wastewater treatment, and food safety enforcement. Yes, there are private companies that do some of those things, but the government pays them. Either way, we pay for those things. You can't just get rid of them. As for food safety, many people think we should just get rid of food and consumer product safety regulations because they're part of a slow, bloated government. The problem is, there's no profit incentive to make your products safe, or free from bacteria, or medicinally effective. The government establishes and enforces those guidelines because literally no one else will. And in fact, you really don't need to dig that deep to find out what the world was like before food safety laws and the FDA existed (hint: meat is a great way to kill people). The overwhelming fact of the matter is the government is important. Can it be better? Yes. Can it be smaller? Yes. But running on a platform of gutting the federal government is just unreasonable. #politics